Describing spatiotemporal couplings in ultrashort pulses using coupling coefficients

Three coupling coefficients are defined to describe spatiotemporal coupling in ultrashort pulses. With these coupling coefficients, the first-order spatiotemporal couplings of Gaussian pulse and beam are described analytically. Also, the first-order and the second-order spatiotemporal couplings caused by angular dispersion elements are studied using these coupling coefficients. It can be shown that these coupling coefficients are dimensionless and normalized, and readily indicate the severity of spatiotemporal coupling.